Under construction

9/26/2022: Expect numerous changes over the coming week.

This guide intends to inform users about posture tagging practices, and make it easier for novice, and experienced taggers alike to more easily tag an inherently tricky aspect of character portrayal.

Introduction to Postures

A posture is a bodily position; a fundamental component of body language both in real life, and fictional imagery. Posture tags have much to do with how a character is oriented in the scene, but also how they are interacting within the scene with other characters, or objects.

Basic postures

These are the most common postures. Most posts will contain one, or more of these tags.

• all_fours
• crouching
• kneeling
• leaning
• leaning_aside
• leaning_back
• leaning_forward
• lying - Not to be confused with reclining.
• on_back
• on_front
• on_side
• reclining - Intermediate state between sitting, and lying.
• side_reclining
• sitting
• standing

Types of postures

A posture that is associated with having sex is referred to as a sex position. Sex positions exclusively use the tag format x_position. On the site, sex_position is not a valid tag, but a list of sex positions can be found at tag_group:sex_positions.

A posture that has some creative, or artistic quality to it is known as a pose. Poses use the tag format x_pose to distinguish the themes from sex positions. Do try to remember this while tagging. There are many styles of poses; you can find tags related to them including many posture tags at tag_group:pose.

Singular / Plural tagging

You will notice that many posture tags will by divided into multiple tags with similar formats. This usually means that the concepts have the singular concepts (involve one thing), and the plural concepts (involves multiple things) organized into separate tags. These tags are usually distinct and do not overlap. Please do not make the mistake of treating plural terms as if they mean the same thing as singular. There are only a few concepts on the entire site that use plural terms to refer to singular, and posture tags are not included.

Arm, and leg interaction / posture tags are especially important to keep organized between singular and plural.

Examples of singular formats

• hand_on_hip
• raised_leg _{The plural form is legs_up, not raised_legs. Most tags with this format will replace the singular form to plural, e.g. leg -> legs.}

Examples of plural formats

• arms_bent
• hands_on_legs

You will notice that some tags such as hand_on_breast include both singular and plural themes. Themes that are more sexual in nature tend to share a single tag, while themes that are more important to constructing poses are organized into multiple tags. The more likely a theme is to apply to a pose or general body position, the more important it becomes to keep that theme distinguishable between singular and plural.

Component postures

Beyond the basic postures tags are the posture component tags that refer to specific placement of body parts individually, or in relation to other body parts. These are the building blocks of poses simple and complex. Component tags are important as they allow for poses to be defined from their individual parts without needing a specific name for a pose.

Common themes

• Contact status: Whether some bodily region is being held, grabbed, or touched; there is a distinction. See tag_group:touching for a list of these themes.
• Orientation: Whether a body part is bent, extended, by one's side, supporting the character, etc.
• Raised status: Whether a body part is lifted to some elevated state.
• Relative position: Whether a body part is above, under, behind, or in front of some other body part (arm_under_breasts, hands_behind_back, hand_under_leg, etc).